India is home to about 1600 languages. Less than 5% of this population is English literate. A consortium effort on developing a common framework to build text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) in various Indian languages has already been realized. In this paper, we propose a parallel effort to integrate the various TTS systems developed into various applications. These applications are primarily aimed at bringing the marginalized sections of Indian society into the main stream. The applications integrated include: i) screen readers for the visually challenged on desktop platforms ii) web-based plug-in to read highlighted text for the language challenged iii) integration of TTS with optical character recognition systems iv) various applications for the Android platform v) On-line test and tutorial for visually challenged and vi) conversion of gesture to speech for persons with cerebral palsy.The performance of the integrated systems have been extensively tested by visually challenged persons for the last three years. About 180 students have learnt to use the Office Suite, Internet and e-mail over the last 3 years.

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